


Legacy

by florahart



Category: The Martian (2015)
Genre: F/M, complicated work/personal relationships, consideration of zero-g sexing, getting past trauma, teasing from a teammate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:41:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28146999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/florahart/pseuds/florahart
Summary: The return trip gives Beck and Johanssen time together.
Relationships: Chris Beck/Beth Johanssen
Comments: 18
Kudos: 60
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Legacy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ppyajunebug](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ppyajunebug/gifts).



> Request said nothing angsty, and I belatedly realized that it was possible I wasn't drawing that line at the same place as requestee. I used a distressing feature from the book (see endnote if you need to know; it's non-explicit in this text) that's not really alluded to but also not negated in the movie as a jumping off point, but honestly, this is everything getting better from there, no other unhappy feels.

Four days since the catch, and he’s pretty sure Johanssen hasn’t gotten any sleep worth mentioning. Beck squints through the window where his arm of _Hermes_ lines up with the gym as they rotate, and yeah, she’s running again. Third time she’s been in the gym outside of her regular schedule in the same timeframe. That he knows about. 

He goes back to processing the batch of weekly tests they’ve all given up a couple of tablespoons of blood for every Friday since they left Cape Canaveral, most of which do not at all require his presence but he can’t quite stand to just let the machine replace him and so he watches the centrifuge do its thing and checks the time; Vogel will be up to replace Martinez in half an hour and he’ll go get the last sample for this week.

It’s none of his business, the treadmill time, except for how it is; his unique job on this boat is doctoring, up to and including managing the emotional health of the group. Everyone here is well-educated on the need to maintain a certain level of physical ability but not work to exhaustion, and she’s no different. Trouble is, he does in fact want an excuse to get closer to her, and he’s not totally sure this is professionally appropriate. Doctoring his own emotional health in the long term is one of the things the brass had been worried about (not that they said so; admitting to the public that astronauts, the people with The Right Stuff, have emotional vulnerabilities is not done), but here they are, and he’s going to have to work through the contours of his scope of practice woes alone.

Anyway, considering the circumstances, which include a journey of five-sometimes-six people, comprising literal years, which has now been damn near doubled without a pause or any kind of real break… _Is_ there a scope of professional appropriateness? No one was expecting them to need to maintain ordinary interactions under these kinds of pressures for what’s going to turn out to be four years when it’s all said and done, and nothing in the manuals was ever designed to describe coping with, or assisting the emotional well-being of others coping with, the emotional yoyo of the Watney situation. And, too, the person quietly tasked with making sure he himself is not going off the rails is, well, farming potatoes fifteen or so communication-minutes away.

Also, he thinks he and Vogel might actually be listed as adoptive uncles in the Martinez family Bible, and that seems pretty boundary-blurring to him. In any case, for the same reasons he means to stop in and meet these faux nieces, nephews, and near-sisters after this is all over with, he also means to commence spending a whole lot of time with Johanssen, if she’ll let him, but that’s two years away still. Ugh.

 _Hermes_ rotates again and he doesn’t _try_ to look, exactly, but his eyes do it anyway, and he finds Johanssen’s done running, only now… damn it. Now Lewis is up there running instead, and that’s _not better_. Even with basically nothing between them and maybe (hopefully, although a part of him thinks he should assert definitely even in his own mind just to keep morale up) a meet-up a lot of months down the line, the commander needs to keep her physical exertion to the standard and get enough sleep. He doesn’t want her on 4am sprints either.

But, it does give him a reason to go talk _to her_ , a person about whom he is fundamentally less worried, about how the ‘near a planet’ part of the schedule requires them to sleep when they’re supposed to so enough of them are up and alert at all the right times when _Hermes_ needs them to actually do something, so he glances through the analyses on his monitor, just to make sure there’s nothing alarming (there isn’t, although he’s not thrilled with what Johanssen’s protein consumption must be; anyway, no one is dying of malaria or anything), then pushes off and kicks up the ladder, turning to land in gravity. 

“Can’t sleep?” he asks, keeping his tone light like he’s just randomly making conversation (at four in the morning on an interplanetary flight full of traumatized people who are hiding their trauma from each other, themselves, and the world, you know, like you do).

Lewis turns a glance at him. “Thirty minutes,” she says.

Okay. Not fooling anyone, then. “Bargaining already?”

“My sleep is fucked, but I’m trying to fix it. Trying to do just enough to get a little tired, not enough to get a little wired,” she says. “You got a better prescription?”

He shakes his head and goes with honesty. “No, but you’re not the only one running the night away, and I want to make sure it’s not a growing problem.”

She presses her lips together, breathing audibly through her nose (irritation, he thinks, not strain). “You need me to set a better example.”

He waggles a hand. “I need you to narrate your process somewhere that certain other people will work out that you’re moving around to get to a warm milk and sweet dreams place, not running to get the shit away from the extremely real stress you and all of us are feeling despite being near superhuman. Ma’am.”

“You think anyone doesn’t know the score? No one on this boat is exactly stupid.”

He whuffs one sharp chuckle. “Nah. But they pay me to be the doctor, and I feel like it’s only right that I make sure if anyone is starting down a bad path, I get in the way a little, you know?”

She nods. “Twelve minutes to go, and I’ll try to run into her before I crash. That work?”

Beck shrugs. “For the time being.”

“She going to be all right? You worried she’s breaking?”

“Doctor-patient, ma’am. But I’m just being careful.”

That’s true, for what it’s worth. He knows Johanssen is likely smarter than any two of the rest of them and also tougher than most Marines, and he’s laying odds around 99.44% she’ll square herself away. Still, everyone has limits, and being strong and smart does not at all preclude struggling. He goes to catch Vogel before he replaces Martinez, and starts the first round of the port aft telemetry calibration while he waits on the new analysis. 

Then around 7:30 or so he starts counting his own breath in and out, long and even but not quite invariable. It’s a practice he learned as a too-smart eleven-year-old, grade-skipped into high school and feeling the pressures of his own and everyone else’s expectations, a sort of self-directed meditation toward sleep. He’s supposed to go down around eight, and he means to set that example.

\--

“You eat yet?” 

This is not a question to which he doesn’t know the answer; they record every MRE they open up, and Johanssen hasn’t eaten dinner yet; also she barely managed half her lunch. It’s lunchtime for Beck now—they’re still near(ish) a planet, six more days until they mostly come back around to more aligned schedules—so he has both meals on their little trays in his hands. He’s also rearranged them; hers has most of his protein and his has some of her carbs. 

She glances at him, then down to the trays, then back up. “I guess you hope not?”

He shrugs a little “Something like that. Here.”

She takes the plate and looks at it, all piled up. “This is not a standard ration.”

“Yep.” He pulls up a chair and sits across the corner of the desk from her, then tucks into his meal.

“Neither is yours.”

“Yep.”

“You’re worried about my iron count.”

He makes a back and forth ‘so-so’ gesture with his fork and keeps eating.

“I’m working on it.”

“I know. I’m helping.”

She doesn’t say anything, and picks up her own fork, pushing the food around. “It’s just.”

“Red meat?” He raises his eyebrows at her. “No shit.”

“I’d have done it, if I’d had to.”

“I know. I’m glad you didn’t have to. Super glad, since it was a plan that was bad fucking news for me. However, I am sitting here eating with you as visual evidence. Eat up. I do have the supplies to supplement you if we need to, _and it is okay if you need that_ , but I want to save as much of it as I can for Watney.”

She brings a bite of almost-decent stroganoff in her mouth and holds it there, visibly struggling with it until she grumbles, “Sorry,” and takes the bite. She swallows it almost whole, but he will take what he can get.

“Nope, we’re all in this boat together. Literally. All the time. A hundred percent of the time. Exhaustingly constant. Want me to come back for breakfast?”

“Usually eggs.”

“Cool. I’ll bring you lunch tomorrow and while I egg it up, you can demo a couple good days in a row, yeah?”

She scowls. “I would have figured it out.”

“I know.” And really, he _does_ know. If nothing else, and besides that most likely the commander was not all that subtle about the conversation they probably had post-treadmill, the first time he hauled her in to supplement, she’d have worked out on her own these were supplies they might put to better use. Probably before that she’d have come to him herself if she couldn’t choke down the rations two weeks on or something. Still, nipping this shit in the bud is just going to be easier on everyone, plus it reinforces the idea she’s not on her own. “So, what are we going to do about the sleep?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t want drugs for that. I need to stay sharp.”

“I was not at this point going to suggest drugs, but also? Are you sharp now?”

She pushes food around again, then firms her lips into an expression of annoyance, clearly at herself, and takes a defiant bite. “No, but I have my own irritation to help with that. I’m in better shape than Mark, anyway, and he’s managing.”

“He is, but he has tried to blow himself up a couple of times, so I’m not sure that’s your best comparison.”

“Still, I don’t want you to knock me out unless things get drastic, _which is why I have not asked for your help_.”

“Again, not where we are. Although I should mention that the explicit reason we all have multiple secondary assignment is so that we can get by if someone gets really sick and has to dip out of the rotation for even a couple of weeks.”

“Yeah, and we already have someone dipped out for years, so your point is ridiculous. But so no drugs. What, then? Bedtime stories?”

“I dunno. I’m askin’.”

“What about you? How are _you_ sleeping?” She looks up at him for real, now, making eye contact while she scoops up another bite, and actually, ugh, she sees that he’s pretty close to the edge himself, because as previously noted he wants to be close to her, and that means he wants to tell her things.

“With meditation and determination,” he says after a pause. “Why?”

“The rest of us just have to get there and back. You have to figure out how to make him whole again.”

Which is, of course, part of what does keep him up. “Well, between you and me,” he says lightly, sticking his finger in the leftover sauce in his dish and wiping up a dollop to lick clean, “Ain’t none of this crew ever really gonna be whole again, so the bar isn’t as high as you might think on that.”

That’s also true. He’s getting at least slightly comfortable with the notion that they’re probably all going to need a lot, like a lot of actual therapy in the long run, regardless of whether they manage to—miraculously—retrieve Watney still breathing and despite that they were selected for this mission for being unlikely to crack and that it’s in his scope to keep it that way. So there’s that, although maybe if they stay on track for that miracle, it’ll be less all-encompassing.

“And you’re okay with that?”

“No.” He doesn’t mean to say it sharply, but he does, and then he shakes his head. “So why, exactly, did I put Watney in charge of my emotional health? Clearly you have some skills.”

She shrugs. “I’m better at math.”

“Good point. Although, I dunno, like you said before, he’s apparently worked out a hell of a lot for himself.”

“But you haven’t really answered my question. Meditation and determination? What, you just insist you’re going to sleep, and that works?”

“More or less. Doesn’t always mean I _stay_ asleep, but it’s an okay start.”

“Well then. Is this a teachable skill?”

“Maybe.”

She nods and shoves another bite in her mouth – a chunk of meatball from his sandwich. “Fine, okay. I should sleep around your dinnertime. Will you be in your lab?”

“I don’t think I should teach you to go to sleep in my lab,” he says. “Wouldn’t want to have to lug you back to your quarters like a kid that sacked out at the movies. I’ll come to you.”

She shrugs and keeps her eyes on her food. “Sure, if you’re not busy. Plus then if you can’t teach me to breathe through my eyelids or whatever, I guess you can always give stories a try?” He spends a few seconds trying to read the body language, but all he gets it uncharacteristic shyness, like it’s weird he’s just inviting himself over.

Which is absurd, since they all live about a millimeter and a half outside each other’s actual skin and have for two years. There’s no such thing as separation for interplanetary voyaging. Well, he’ll figure it out later.

“Good.” He picks up the last scrap of his bread and pops it in his mouth. “I’ll bring my dinner and your recently-prescribed snack, and we’ll get things handled.”

\--

In the end, it’s less of a struggle than he expects, getting her to sleep. 

A lot less, because, and if he had employed one small grain of sense here, this should have been predictable, when he’d gone to demonstrate his process, she’d scrunched over and patted the bunk next to her, and what was he going to do, suggest her virtue would be impaired by his _medically-appropriate_ visit? Because that would imply other things going on, and sure, he’s up for anything she wants to do with or to him, but since that’s absolutely not what they’re doing right _now_ , and also by the way so far he’s not so sure she wants to do _anything_ with or to him, he plunks his butt down and turns to put his feet up. Sharing a pillow isn’t weird. Right? 

And the long and the short of this is, he hadn’t wanted to lug her back from his lab, but he hadn’t thought about how he might fall asleep himself.

Which he should have, since the whole point of his process, which he’d been refining for literal decades, was to make him fall asleep.

Things start out fine. He brings his dinner (turkey pot pie) and her snack (pigs in blankets, half a packet, second half ready for tomorrow; this is fine because they are actually a little oversupplied because Watney hasn’t been eating all the way back), and while they eat he lets her explain something about multibody perturbations and an idea she has to reorganize how the computer prioritizes inputs to improve efficiency in calculation time, the effect of which would be to give the human, the pilot, a few more seconds of reaction time in a crisis. 

Which seems like a great idea, although since Beck’s actual understanding of orbital mechanics is more general physics, less practical applied astronauting, it’s mostly conceptual. Finally, she yawns (promising!) and he sends her to brush her teeth, and then they get on the bunk. It’s narrow, because it’s not like anything on _Hermes_ is designed for plush luxury, but they’re just lying there elbow to elbow on their backs, talking about breathing.

And then he falls asleep.

He wakes up with gunk in the corners of his eyes, decidedly warmer and colder sides of his body, a hard-on, and a mouthful of Johanssen’s hair.

Very professional. Fuck. He puts up his free hand, the one that hasn’t come to rest around her ribs against his side, to remove the hair and consider wriggling free.

But she’s asleep, like really asleep, snoring, drooling on his chest, heavy (for a person nearly too small for the suits), and he actually doesn’t have anything in his task list for the evening that means he _needs_ to get up, so instead he reaches overhead for the lighting control, dims the room, and goes back to meditative breathing.

He next wakes up with Martinez, who had apparently been looking for him for one of the standing checkups before bed (which for crying out loud he can do himself; it’s just a thermometer and a couple of swabs and is not at all rocket surgery), standing in the doorway hooting at them at whatever the local-time equivalent of five am is, so that’s perfect, and sighs when she lets go of him and sits up.

He gets off the bunk, tells her to go back to sleep and tucks her in, and then goes to murder Martinez for waking her since damn it.

What, they always thought they were getting home one astronaut short; what’s it matter which one? 

Fine, they probably need the pilot. However, he has a whole lot of months to heal from some low-key maiming and being a jackass is maimworthy.

\--

Things NASA designed well on their first interplanetary ships:

1\. Really great separation of spaces; despite that they are six (five, but six) adults living in a total footprint not much bigger than an ordinary midwest ranch-style home of the eighties, and they can’t go outside, it doesn’t generally feel cramped.  
2\. Entertainment and movement spaces that don’t impinge on each other or the job(s) they each do.  
3\. A pretty awesome medical suite that is better than anything in any hospital on earth on a number of axes; its only weakness is: one on-call surgeon, total. Can’t win ‘em all.  
4\. Surprisingly flexible workspaces; Beck had fully expected that since all astronauts are supposed to be in amazing physical condition, they would have to just tolerate good-enough seats and tables, but no, everything is adjustable and manufactured to tolerate being adjusted.  
5\. Excellent storage of all kinds of the varieties of tools they might need. So far ever time they’ve needed a spanner, one that suits their purpose has been in the room in which it’s needed.

Things NASA did not design well on their first interplanetary ships:

1\. Beds in which two adults fit well if they are anything other than perfectly still. It’s a good thing both of them are fundamentally quiet sleepers.

\--

Bed dimension notwithstanding, it was actually pretty good sleep, Beck thinks, although this is largely because Johanssen is the tiniest astronaut ever – she barely meets the minimums on every size measure. 

Also, and this is relevant to his doctor role, which he does like to do well and keep in sight at all times, Johanssen makes steady progress on eating normally as he keeps showing up with bedtime snacks and stories.

(He gets why she struggled. Literally every nonsociopath on the planet would have needed a moment, and he’s pretty sure he himself would have needed more than one. There’s no shame in being the kind of ego that gets on the boat while also not being a sociopath.)

So, as they move back toward ordinary shipboard schedules, where they’re generally all up at about the same time, Beck just keeps returning to Johanssen’s quarters for breathing and, all right, and snuggles. Sometimes there are stories. Sue him.

Martinez is a shit about how no one else has a cuddlebuddy (Beck invites him to challenge Vogel to a spoon-off if he really feels strongly about it), but after a while even he stops commenting, and then it just becomes the norm: Lewis and Vogel do science together; Martinez and Johanssen do pilot math things together; Beck and Lewis do reports together; Beck and Johanssen sleep together.

It’s all it is: sleep. 

With cuddling. 

And stories. 

And drooling, shut up.

Just sleep. Until it’s not.

There’s no real privacy, or expectation of privacy, on _Hermes_ , unwelcome Martinez intrusions aside. This isn’t news; they have to know if any of the team are physically unable to work or likely to become so, so even though none of them would ever, _ever_ admit even the smallest of frailties to Houston, a thing which astronauts simply do not do, discussions of poop quality or the weird ovarian cramp Lewis sometimes gets because guess what one of the costs of this addition to the trip is that her implant is failing are fully on the table among them. Also, whatever, when they were in the Hab everyone effectively shared a room, so each of them has ignored one or more other’s morning wood.

Actually, this may be another design flaw, although the part of him that is a holdover from when he worked as an EMT for a time is fond of the fact that there is nowhere in the ship that he would have to break down a door to stop the bleeding.

Anyway.

Beck encourages the oversharing, more or less, although he does (and so does Lewis) stomp down on any razzing that borders on harassment about being somehow weak; there’s trash talk and then there’s teamwork, and as the mechanic in charge of keeping all the bodies running his ideal case is if they love each other enough to tease and know about any weaknesses, but also remain willing to complain when they’re injured so he can _fix_ it.

So: no privacy. Still, they do have slide-doors on their little compartments, and no, no locks, and sure, generally (except for Martinez) most of them do sort of usually pat the wall and wait for some kind of mumble before barging in, so that makes finding alone time somewhat more challenging than it could be.

However, Beck is a very smart person, and so is Johanssen, and so after about the thirtieth morning in a row when they wake up and moon at each other (ha, astronauts, moon. Well anyway) for five minutes before they get their shit together and start working out what day it is and where they are on the rotation, they both blurt out some combination of, “Should we just— Do you feel— I was just—” and then stop to laugh at each other.

Five minutes later, they have the sliding door jury-rigged to refuse to open right away, bleeding potential be damned (he’s on this side anyway) and the kissing has commenced. By mutual agreement, they set aside the problem of to what extent either or both of them wants to get naked given they are essentially always on call as an exercise for another day; kissing is fine.

\--

“Right, so not that this isn’t great,” Johanssen (Beth. It’s probably weird if he keeps calling her Johanssen?) says, another month along when kissing is a near-constant part of their sleep/wake routines, “but I’ve been thinking about whether sex in zero G is possible.”

Beck raises his eyebrows. “Complicated, anyway; the pressure systems are all tangled up. But that’s not a reason it’s impossible, for healthy people. Still, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we have nonzero G on much of _Hermes_ so if this is a practical question—”

“We have nonzero G where there is allzero privacy.”

“Uh.” Okay, that makes him sound extremely learned and clever. 

“My point is, the only parts of the ship where we could probably assume no one would just wander on through are all in the weightless areas.”

This is, actually, true. While the zero-G areas are all in the central part of the ship and also are all heavily used for travel between the various labs and living areas, there are also a couple of smaller spaces which aren’t in the living spaces because they don’t need to be, and which are enclosable.

“All right, but privacy considerations aside, there are practical ones.”

“Sure. Lewis’s implant is reaching end of life, so probably so is mine.”

Beck blinks. “True, but I was actually thinking about the mechanics of the act itself. Like, we’d have to hang onto things, which means we couldn’t touch as much, which means—”

“This is definitely the sexiest conversation I’ve ever had.”

“ _What._ You started it. Also, I’m not wrong.” At this point they’ve left her (their) quarters and are heading for breakfast, and half of Beck’s mind is on the sim he has running for just how nutritionally hosed Watney is going to be.

“You’re not. But I’m pretty sure it’s possible. Math says it’s possible.”

“Biology isn’t sure.”

“I don’t think the touching part is bio. Probably psych.”

Beck thinks about that a minute. “Maybe, but there’s a lot of stuff about the extent to which people don’t do well without some minimum touching threshold.”

Beth is a couple steps ahead of him, which is absurd since he’s about a foot taller, and she looks over her shoulder. “Anyway, I think generally people who are fucking are likely to be touching.”

So, she has a point, but since _of course_ she says this as she pretty much bumps into Martinez, coming out the door with a protein bar half-crammed in his mouth, Beck’s distracted by the faces the guy makes, and then it’s time to get on with their days.

\--

Of course, she shows up at bedtime with …math, actually. She’s done some kind of analysis of what appears to be fifteen factors to do with timing, spatial arrangement of the various pods and modules and what they’re used for when by whom, and task assignment. There are diagrams. There are charts. There are formulas. 

This is possibly the nerdiest thing he’s ever seen, and this is extremely impressive in the context of astronauts who went to freaking Mars. Plus, she looks pretty pleased with herself, which is, well, which he responds well to. 

Actually, he’s sort of crazy about it. Unreasonably crazy. Willing to make another round trip to Mars if it makes her do happy math crazy. 

He sets the diagrams aside and takes her to bed, not in zero G. If Martinez can’t knock, he can just deal with what he sees in the period between when he barges in and Beck has to again consider maiming him. There’s like, another four months before they need him as a pilot.

\--

Things NASA planned for, on this trip:

1\. Redundancy regarding task assignments.  
2\. And oversupply of food for the original timeline and crew, balanced carefully against the additional weight it implied because there’s having spares and there’s endangering the mission.  
3\. Many ways to survive partial depressurizations in a lot of different, but individually sealable, compartments.  
4\. Great entertainment and exercise options because flying for a year is not super amazing for sightseeing except in the parts where one is in fact near(ish) to a planet.  
5\. A surprisingly good complement of crew personalities. There’s every reason they should have fallen apart at least twice by now, and Johanssen’s brief flirtation with disordered eating aside, they’re all pretty okay.

Things NASA did not plan for, on this trip:

1\. A reasonable quantity of condoms. 

There are some, numbering in the low dozens, although the nominal use for them is to contain thing that are not semen – they’re good as a barrier for lots of other reasons. Hell, they’re not a terrible option for things like keeping a bandaged hand or finger clean(er) if someone has to do work while injured in dirty or toxic conditions, of which there is a nonzero chance on a ship where the crew is the only maintenance option. And, NASA knows perfectly well that regardless of gender or relationship status of their crews, a bunch of extremely fit and generally active people in their twenties and thirties living in tight quarters are kind of likely to at least occasionally blow off some steam. So to speak. Actually, the good thing about the sleeping quarters being in the rings and having some real fake gravity is that jerking off doesn’t require extra effort to contain.

Still, the condom supply versus the amount of sex they want to have is just _epically_ inadequate, and Beck makes a note in his logs to double the supply for future teams (shut up, NASA Medical, whatever, so it’s an officially logged note about his own sex life, ugh, but look, there are lots of fine ways to have sex that don’t require them, given her probably-failing implant, but it’s a pain in the ass not to have the option). It goes with the note about making sure they have on board the capacity to replace implants if for some reason, and Christ on a cracker he wants this to never come up for this reason again, they have to extend. He should have thought to ask about it for the catch, but he totally failed to think about it until literally the day before, and he’s pretty sure Teddy would have actually killed him if he’d asked at that point.

\--

“You and Johanssen, huh?” Watney says, voice creaky and gruff roughly thirty minutes after he wakes up from the induced coma Beck put him in as soon as he could drag his scrawny broken ass to Medical and staple everything back together in some approximation of the expected configuration of a human body. He’s on some good drugs for the ribs, the spinal compression, and a lot of corrective crap Beck had to fix around the scar tissue from the original puncture, and also he’s getting nutritional and hydration supplements as fast as his body can use them.

“What.” Beck watches the drip rate on the saline and thumbs across the control doodad.

“Oh please. I would have had to lose all human contact for a couple of years not to see the two of you, you lucky asshole. OH WAIT, it was so obvious even that didn’t keep it a secret. Anyway, which was worse? Martinez being a shit or Lewis having concerns?”

Back considers whether to say that actually, Lewis didn’t bat an eye. “Well, Martinez being a shit is kind of a universal constant.”

“Pilots.”

“Exactly.”

Watney nods, a minute little movement because he’s got wires and ports all over him. “Anyway, you know I have to debrief with the commander, right?”

‘Not yet, you don’t. I want to keep you under close observation for a _while_.”

“Pssh. There is nothing about that which will be in any way stressful to me, seriously, look what I did when my supply situation was a potato, dehydrated literal not-just-Martinez shit, an old robot, a bunch of balloons, and some space suits that didn’t fit right. But my _point_ is, you look like you have been here for a couple of days.”

Beck shrugs. “Not like I got a whole medical staff to keep an eye on the biggest troublemaker on the entire planet.”

“Solar system, motherfucker. I am the biggest troublemaker on _all_ the planets.”

“And so modest.”

“Yeah, but like, you wanna sit here with _me_ while you could be getting busy with _her_? I assume I’ve been out long enough she’s not busy mathing it up still, so like, go get that! Send the commander in to watch me. Or Martinez, I guess, since I probably still owe him an explanation about how I used his religious artifact to slightly blow up the Hab.”

“We got time,” Beck says. “It’s about a whole year til we get home, and we got the rest of our lives. And we have actual jobs to do, right?”

“Yeah, and it’s great for me that you do.” Watney pauses. “Rest of your lives, huh? You tell ground control about you yet, or is Lewis keeping you quiet?”

“Quiet, although not because we care. Just, we wanted to make sure we had you fetched before we went all glad tidings.”

“Fair. Does this mean there’s a pool open on whether Annie has a stroke, a heart attack, or a party? Also, wait, hey, rest of your lives, that implies a question has been asked and answered. And Lewis is the captain of a ship and stuff, and as you know, I brushed up on maritime law. You get hitched yet?”

Beck snorts and turns the morphine up a little. “Go back to sleep, Watney. You’re delirious.”

“Sure, it’s all me. You totally should, though. Get hitched. Hey by the way did you go through my stash while I was dead?” Watney’s words slur. “Cause I brought more crmmmum…”

\--

Fucking ethics, that Beck is 90% sure that word was condoms, and now that Watney is back he’s not going to go digging in his stash. 

Damn it.

Also, they are not getting married up here. His sister would probably filet him for the gall, and he doesn’t want to exclude Beth’s dad, either. Still, he does relay the conversation to her.

She laughs and goes back to work, and Beck spends the day ignoring both the potential for additional condoms and the question of to what purpose, exactly, Watney would have brought them (although the answer that is probably, ‘because Watney’) while he runs back through everyone’s logs for the period in which he was up to his ass in keeping all their recent prodigal’s systems working. Seriously, he thinks the margin for when they got to him might have been days at the outside, more likely hours, and on the scale of years they’re working with, it’s fucking impossible they made it. He’s going to get a dozen articles out of the work of the last few days, but that means he has been putting in exactly zero point zero percent effort on keeping anyone else healthy. 

Fortunately, all is well.

Beth shows up at bedtime with a box of condoms. Like a hundred of them. “Mark says this is our wedding gift,” she says. “He also says if we don’t tell Annie Montrose to get people to toss birdseed at us when we get home, he will.”

“He’s kind of an ass.”

“Yeah, but an ass with useful supplies,” she says, pulling her shirt over her head.

He can’t really argue with that.

\--

Things the NASA media team was or became prepared for during this mission:

1\. Telling the country an astronaut died.  
2\. Telling the country j/k, lol.  
3\. Telling the crew, not because they wanted to, the jerks, about the j/k, lol situation.  
4\. Telling the country the crew was going to leave no man behind.  
5\. Telling the world that China was okay after all, occasionally, sometimes, ish.

Things the NASA media team was not at all prepared for during this mission:

1\. Mark Watney, in general, because apparently all the social rules about f-bombs in public are the very absolute first thing lost when one is socially isolated for a long time in a terminally-terrible environment while injured with no hope of rescue and a disco overload as primary entertainment. But more importantly,

2\. Mark Watney, Wedding Planner.

(he totally told NASA, once he convinced them to do a shipboard wedding because chop chop, you never know, time’s a-wastin’. He also absolutely sent coded messages to Mindy and made her arrange for the birdseed on arrival, and to get messages to both families that they should definitely plan a ceremony because both participants will be swamped and the families being happy is all they want anyway. Two days before they drop into Earth’s atmosphere, social media goes absolutely nuts with the story. It’s ridiculous. He thinks they should name their first child after him.)

(Beck isn’t actually opposed, but Beth says rewarding this kind of media mugging will probably end poorly for everyone; since Beth is usually right about, well, everything, he’s going with her interpretation of events.)

\--

“You know,” Beth says, waving at the crowd and yelling in Beck’s ear because good god, the entire country has showed up to see them land, “I think we should set Mark up with Mindy. Only fair.”

Beck looks down at her and grins. “I think we should send them to a disco bar for their first date.”

She grins back up, ignoring the dozens (hundreds? Thousands?) of flash bulbs and offering a look of the kind of mischief that strikes fear in the hearts of most. Not that he is most; he’s a goddamn astronaut. “Also, because everyone knows about us anyway,” she says, “there is no reason whatsoever we need to keep our cool about anything.”

“I don’t really think I was ever cool to begin with,” is all he manages to reply before she smirks and hops up to plant a wet kiss on his mouth; he shakes his head, stops walking, and bends her back like a World War II nurse kissing a sailor, and lets the media do their thing.

Watney, walking a few meters behind them, has to stop as well, and when they stand back up he’s mock-glaring, arms akimbo. “My media moment, you are stealing it!”

“You started this shit, man,” Beck says.

Mark cackles and throws an arm around each of them. “That I did,” he says. “My legacy. I thought it was going to be potato farming, but this is better.”

**Author's Note:**

> (In the book, it's clearly explained that if the supplies are not received (if they can't meet/dock), then because the crew of _Hermes_ can't land on earth because of the physics of what's already in motion, the four who are not Beth (who is the smallest and therefore requires the fewest calories to survive) will cleanly kill themselves in order that she can survive on the meat and at least it will still be possible for one of them to bring Hermes home in the long run. This was just sort of skipped in the movie, which I get because yeesh, but I also think it's one of the most interesting things in the story, the idea of living with having made that decision. So, in this story, it starts with them spending time together because she's struggling with the issue, but there is nothing explicit about it mentioned and certainly no grossout details.)


End file.
